The Color Lexicon of American English

The Color Lexicon of American English
Delwin T. Lindsey*1, 2
Angela M. Brown2
1
Department of Psychology, Mansfield, OH
2
College of Optometry, Columbus, OH
Ohio State University
USA
August 11 2013
*Corresponding author:
[email protected]
To Appear in Journal of Vision.
Pre-press version. Do Not Distribute or Cite.
For discussion in our Color and Cognition Group with Permission from Angela Brown.
1 Abstract
This report describes color naming by 51 American English-speaking informants. A free-naming task
produced 122 monolexemic color terms, with which informants named the 330 Munsell samples from the
World Color Survey. Cluster analysis consolidated those terms into a glossary of 20 named color
categories, including the 11 Basic Color Term (BCT) categories of Berlin & Kay, plus 9 non-basic
chromatic categories. The glossed data revealed two color-naming motifs: the green-blue motif of the
World Color Survey and a novel green-teal-blue motif, which featured peach, teal, lavender, and maroon
as high-consensus terms. Women used more terms than men, and more women expressed the novel motif.
Under a constrained-naming protocol, informants supplied BCTs for the color samples previously given
non-basic terms. Most of the glossed non-basic terms from the free-naming task named low-consensus
colors located at the BCT boundaries revealed by the constrained-naming task. This study provides
evidence for continuing evolution of the color lexicon of American English, and provides insight into the
processes governing this evolution.
165 words Keywords: Color naming, Color motifs, Basic Color Terms, World Color Survey, Color Term Evolution 2 Introduction
Humans can discriminate on the order of 106 different colors, many more colors than any individual can
name reliably. These colors fall into a much smaller number of categories that speakers in a language
community can name and can use among themselves to communicate about color. People around the
world differ greatly in the number of these named color categories. However, despite more than 150 years
of research, several unresolved issues persist regarding cross-cultural differences in color lexicon. One of
these issues concerns how best to characterize the relative importance of terms of a language's color
lexicon. Another is how to compare and contrast color lexicons across the world’s 7,000 living languages.
The third issue concerns the evolution of a language's color lexicon as color categories change. The
present study seeks to address some of these issues by analyzing the color naming behavior of a group of
native English-speaking informants drawn from the relatively culturally-homogeneous population of Ohio
State University faculty, staff, and students.
Berlin & Kay
The context for this work is the classic theoretical analysis of cross-cultural differences in color categories
by Berlin & Kay (1969). On the basis of their study of 98 world languages, these authors advanced two
conjectures about the differences they observed. Their first conjecture was that there is a limited set of
basic color terms (here, “BCTs”) in most languages, which are distinct from other color terms that an
individual might use to name colors. According to the first conjecture, the colors in the lexicon of each
language are a subset drawn on a universal set of eleven color categories, which are closely related to the
BCTs of English and other languages spoken in technologically-advanced societies. Berlin & Kay’s
second conjecture was that color lexicons evolve from simple to complex, along highly constrained paths,
starting from two BCTs corresponding to warm-or-light and dark-or-cool categories in the most primitive
lexicons, and ending with the 11 BCTs of languages like English.
The First Conjecture: The Basic Color Terms and their universality
Berlin and Kay proposed that most world languages include a set of Basic Color Terms in their lexicons.
According to their definition, the BCTs are monolexemic (single, non-compound words that lack
modifying prefixes or suffixes), and they are used principally in reference to the colors of things, without
constraint as to what thing is being described. Moreover, BCTs are present in the idiolects of all
informants speaking a given language, are used in a consistent way across all informants, and can be used
to partition color space exhaustively. By these and other criteria, Berlin and Kay proposed eleven English
BCTs: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray. In contrast to the
BCTs, most languages, including English, have additional color terms that fail to meet one or more of
these criteria: either not everybody uses them (e.g., chartreuse in English), or they are not monolexemic
(e.g., light blue in English) or they are restricted as to what they can name (e.g., blond in English).
Basic Color Terms name basic color categories. While the terms themselves are specific to a language
(the same samples might be called red in English, rouge in French, akai in Japanese, and so forth), Berlin
& Kay’s first conjecture was that the color categories these terms refer to are universal across languages.
While not every language has every color category named within its lexicon, Berlin & Kay proposed that
“a total universal inventory of exactly eleven basic color categories exists from which the eleven or fewer
basic color terms of any language are always drawn.”
3 In the years since Berlin & Kay, an enormous amount of research has been done to determine whether
their first conjecture is correct. Some investigators have addressed the issue of whether the inventory of
terms listed above, and only those color terms, fulfill Berlin & Kay’s definition BCTs, in every known
language. This literature as a whole suggests that at least some BCTs exist in every language that has
been examined, but that there might be more than eleven of them in some cases. Boynton and Olson
(1987, 1990) (see Boynton, 1997, pgs 144-145 for a review) used performance-based measures of color
naming to evaluate the special status of Berlin & Kay's English BCTs. When Boynton & Olson’s
American English-speaking subjects were allowed to use any monolexemic terms to name colors in the
OSA-UCS color system, they used BCTs with significantly greater speed, consensus, and consistency
than non-basic terms, much as Berlin & Kay predicted. Boynton & Olson also noted that a twelfth term –
peach – might, over time, assume BCT status in terms of naming speed, consensus, and consistency.
Sturges & Whitfield (1995) found similar results using Munsell color samples and British Englishspeaking subjects, except that they suggest that the twelfth term might be cream (Sturges & Whitfield,
1997). When Uchikawa and Boynton (1987) applied the methods of Boynton & Olson to the Japanese
color terms, the results were generally similar. Particularly, Uchikawa & Boynton also found that a
similar term – hada (skin), meaning tan – as well as mizu (water), meaning light blue, may be making
their way into the Japanese basic color lexicon. Similarly, several investigators have discussed terms for
light blue, which might be a twelfth BCT in several other languages (Al-Rasheed, Al-Sharif, Thabit, AlMohimeed, & Davies, 2011; Borg, 2007; Friedl, 1979; Ozgen & Davies, 1998; Thierry, Athanasopoulos,
Wiggett, Dering, & Kuipers, 2009; Winawer et al., 2007).
The issue of consensus, which was central to the definition of the BCTs, has turned out to be
unexpectedly complex. Boynton & Olson (1987) revealed clear individual differences among their
observers, and Uchikawa & Boynton (1987) found that there were no 100% consensus colors among the
430 OSA samples corresponding to the Japanese colors akai (red), kuroi (black), kiroi (yellow), and aoi
(blue). Similarly, Sturges & Whitfield (1995) reported no 100% consensus samples for yellow, pink,
orange and white. Furthermore, the issue of consensus is complicated by the existence of synonyms for
many colors: different words might be used by different informants speaking the same language to name
the same or highly similar color categories (violet and purple might be synonyms in English, hairoi and
guree (gray) might be synonyms in Japanese).
Moreover, Lindsey & Brown (2006, 2009) have shown that, strictly speaking, high consensus may be the
exception rather than the rule among the color lexicons in world languages. They examined the World
Color Survey data set (Kay, Berlin, Maffi, Merrifield, & Cook, 2010), a large data base of color naming
by 2616 informants, each speaking one of 110 unwritten languages and living a traditional lifestyle far
from daily influences of modern technology. Each WCS informant was tested with a standard set of 330
Munsell color samples of varying hue, value and chroma (shown in Fig. 1a), one at a time, in a fixed
pseudo-random order, and provided a color name for each. Lindsey and Brown (2006) used cluster
analysis to extract a glossary of universal terms used by WCS informants. A second cluster analysis
(Lindsey & Brown, 2009) on the glossed color naming systems of WCS informants revealed that the
color vocabularies of WCS informants clustered into four distinct vocabulary types (“motifs”), where
each motif had its own characteristic set of color terms. Crucially, multiple motifs occurred side by side
within most WCS languages. This meant, for example, that some speakers of a language might use only
color terms glossed as black, white, and red, while others might use five color terms, and still others
might use ten color terms. The lack of consensus revealed by Lindsey & Brown’s 2009 analysis was not
4 merely quibbling about where the boundaries are located in the stimulus set. Rather, it indicates a
profound failure of consensus among the speakers of most WCS languages.
The work of Lindsey & Brown (2009) revealed a new kind of universality in addition to the one proposed
by Berlin & Kay (1969). Whereas the WCS languages differed from one another in how many individuals
used each of the four motifs, the motifs themselves occurred worldwide, even though the informants who
used each of the motifs spoke languages with no known historical linguistic ties. This suggested that
analysis of color naming must be conducted at the level of the each informant's idiolect, rather than at the
level of the language shared among a community of informants. Furthermore, the results revealed the
usefulness of cluster analysis as an objective means of comparing color naming across languages, thus
avoiding many of the pitfalls associated with glossing color terms by traditional lexicographic techniques.
The second conjecture: The evolution of Basic Color Terms.
Berlin & Kay’s second conjecture was that languages evolve over time by adding new color categories
[see also similar concepts proposed by W. E. Gladstone (1858), Hugo Magnus (translated by Saunders,
2007; Schontag & Schafer-Priess, 2007), and W. H. R. Rivers (1901)]. According to the second
conjecture, new color terms are continually being added to languages that have fewer color terms by
"successive differentiation of previously existing color categories" into smaller, more accurately named
sub-categories (Kay & McDaniel, 1978 pg 640, citing McDaniel manuscript, 1974). This process follows
a series of stages, in a fairly constrained evolutionary trajectory. According to the second conjecture, this
continues until the lexicon reaches a stage equivalent to the eleven basic color categories of English and
other language spoken in industrialized societies. Thus, Berlin & Kay’s second conjecture is that color
lexicons evolve, that they follow a prescribed trajectory, and that color terms are added by “partition” of
existing name color categories.
In a sense, the strict ordering proposed by Berlin & Kay resembles a theory of biological development, in
which maturation of the organism occurs in stages, following a single prescribed trajectory, with minor
differences from individual to individual. More recent work of Kay and his colleagues (2010) has relaxed
and generalized the evolutionary hypothesis considerably, to allow for some languages that do not fit
neatly into one of Berlin & Kay’s original stages, and to suggest a much less constrained, more diverse
range of evolutionary pathways. The more diverse range of trajectories proposed by Kay et al. in 2010
resembles ontological evolution more closely, where a population of organisms can evolve in any of a
number of directions, subject to the Darwinian principles of natural selection.
Berlin and Kay's second conjecture poses two important questions pertaining to languages like American
English, which are spoken in technologically advanced cultures. First, is the current state of modern
color-naming in these languages a proper end-state of color term evolution, as Berlin & Kay proposed?
There is some evidence that it is not. First, several modern languages with more than 11 basic color terms
have been identified, which otherwise satisfy the criteria of Berlin & Kay (1969). These include Russian,
Greek, and Turkish (see references cited above). Second, there is some evidence that other "English-like"
color lexicons may be continuing to evolve. For example, Zollinger (1984) has proposed that turquoise
may be a nascent color category in German, and Boynton and Olson (1987) proposed that even English
itself might be currently evolving, adding peach as a possible new color category.
5 The second question arises if we grant the likelihood of the continuing evolution of the English color
vocabularies: How are the new categories formed? Is the process constrained by Kay and colleagues'
partition principle, or by some other process? An alternative process has been advanced by Levinson
(2000) and Lyons (1995), who have challenged both of Berlin & Kay’s conjectures. Here, we focus on the
second conjecture and Levinson's idea that in the earliest stages of color term evolution, color
vocabularies did not exhaustively name all colors. Rather, according to Levinson, each ancient color term
referred to a restricted range of colors that were identified with a particular item in the environment, for
example a certain animal or plant, or a substance such as blood or bile. Over time, the original terms
generalized to the colors of the substances to which they originally referred. However, great gaps
remained where the colors were either un-named, or else were named with great difficulty. According to
Levinson, additional color terms came into use as the need arose, to name colors in the gaps, colors that
previously had no names. Thus, according to Levinson, “color terms [emerge] out of noncoloric
expressions” (Levinson, 2000, pg. 8), and this view of color term evolution has come to be known as the
“emergence hypothesis.”
This project.
In the present study, we examined Berlin & Kay's two conjectures in light of a new color naming dataset
that we obtained from American English informants. To facilitate comparisons between American
English and the 110 languages represented in the World Color survey, we used the set of Munsell color
samples used in the WCS. We used a “free naming” protocol, in which informants used whatever single
color term they wished, subject to a few simple rules, and we added a “constrained naming” phase to the
data collection protocol, in which only the 11 BCTs of Berlin and Kay were allowed. This constrained
naming phase of the protocol was used to establish each informant's BCT category boundaries. Then, the
deployment of non-basic color names—within vs. between BCT categories—in the free-naming phase
could be gauged in relation to these boundaries.
The data analysis in the present project followed the two-stage cluster analysis methodology of Lindsey &
Brown (2006; 2009). In the first stage, each color term used by every informant was encoded by a
separate binary feature vector, which represented the subset of color samples associated with each color
word. These feature vectors were then partitioned into distinct clusters, which represented a glossary of
distinct color categories identified in the dataset, irrespective of the actual words associated with the
clustered feature vectors. This step avoided the potential pitfalls of synonymy in the data analysis. In the
second stage, the clustered feature vectors were used to reconstruct a representation of the glossed color
naming system for each American English-speaking informant, and a second cluster analysis of the data
set was performed at the level of the informants. This step allowed us to determine whether distinct subpopulations of American English-speaking informants express different color naming motifs. This twostage cluster analysis permitted an analysis of the American English color lexicon that was more nuanced
and powerful than one based on simple tabulation of subject color naming responses.
This analysis was designed to address the issues outlined above. Under the first conjecture, are there color
terms in American English that fulfill Berlin & Kay’s definition of the BCTs? And, are the most common
American English color terms equivalent to the universal color terms that have previously been identified
for the WCS, or do they differ from those universal terms in important ways? Under the second
conjecture, is American English in the process of evolving to higher numbers of BCTs, as suggested by
6 Boynton and Olson? And, if new color terms are evolving in English, do they appear by partitioning
existing categories into smaller ones, as Kay and his colleagues proposed? Or, is Levinson closer to the
mark, with these new terms appearing de novo, popping up in places where no high-consensus color term
exists, and informants find the colors hard to name? Finally, we used the dataset to examine the
relationship between informant gender and color naming. Several studies have proposed that females
have larger color vocabularies than males, possibly for genetic reasons, and women might have a finer
appreciation of the differences between colors and their identities because of their role in modern and
traditional culture.
This data set also allowed us to examine prospectively the generality and replicability of the motifs of
Lindsey & Brown (2009). Their conclusion that multiple motifs exist side by side within the lexicons of
most world languages was based on an analysis of the WCS, a data set that had already been collected.
This unexpected result suggested that the color lexicons of many world languages are currently
undergoing linguistic change, albeit over more trajectories than the simple path originally proposed by
Berlin & Kay. Therefore, it was important to determine whether multiple motifs occur in a data set that
was collected to reveal them if they exist. On one hand, American English is a written language spoken
by a large number of people, which suggests that it might not still be evolving in a basic, common lexicon
such as the names of colors. On the other hand, American culture is highly industrialized, which suggests
that there might be a need for more color terms, as more and more artifacts in American culture differ
from one another only in their color.
Methods
Informants: Fifty-one native American English-speaking informants (24 men and 27 women; ages 19 –
58 yrs), participated in the study. All were born and raised in the United States, none had spoken any
language other than English at home before the age of twelve years, and all resided in the Columbus,
Ohio metropolitan area at the time of testing. None of the informants were aware of the hypotheses being
tested in this study. All subjects reported that they were free of visual pathology except for refractive
error, and all were color-normal, as assessed using the D-15 screening test. The informants were tested
following a protocol previously approved by the Ohio State University's Institutional Review Board, and
all gave informed consent prior to participating in this study.
Data on three additional male informants, one who spoke British English and two who were color vision
specialists and well aware of the hypotheses being tested in this study, have been eliminated from the data
set reported here. None of the results or conclusions from this project is materially affected by exclusion
of these informants.
Color Samples: The 330 color samples were taken from the Munsell Book of Color Glossy Edition and
corresponded closely to those used in the World Color Survey color chart (Kay et al., 2010). Ten samples
were achromatic, with values from 1.5/ to 9.5/ in the notation of the Munsell color order system. The
remaining samples were the 40 equally spaced Munsell hues (2.5 R to 10 RP, in hue steps of 2.5) sampled
at each of 8 values from 2/ – 9/ (hence, 320 hue/value combinations). The chromatic samples generally
had high chroma, except for some hues at the lowest and highest values, where the Munsell Book of
Color does not contain high-chroma samples. Each sample was placed in a 51 x 28 mm holder, which was
covered in ColorAid N4.5 paper, exposing a 20 x 20 mm (2.3 x 2.4 degrees at an approximate viewing
distance of 500 mm) portion of its Munsell sample.
7 Figure 1. a: Color chart approximating the samples used in this study, arranged in the order of
their Munsell hues (horizontal direction of the chart) and values (vertical direction). 1b: Sample
holders, shown on ColorAid N4.5 background.
Apparatus: The color samples were presented in a custom-made light box, with white walls, a floor
covered with ColorAid N 4.5 paper, and a 42 cm x 142 cm opening through which subjects viewed the
illuminated color samples. A bank of four full-spectrum fluorescent lights (F40T12 Spectralite; CRI 90)
suspended from the top of the light box illuminated our color samples. Color calibrations were performed
using a PhotoResearch PR-670 spectrophotometer at regular intervals throughout the duration of the
study. Illumination varied between 1970 and 2216 lux during the course of the study and had a Correlated
Color Temperature (CCT) of between 5200 and 5400 K during the same time period. This CCT is near
that of direct sunlight.
Procedure: At the beginning of each experimental session, the informant was briefed on the nature of the
task. After the informant provided informed consent for participation in accordance with the Declaration
of Helsinki and under the approval of the Ohio State University Institutional Review Board, we obtained
his/her age and sex, the languages he/she spoke and at what age he/she learned them, where he/she was
born and lived as a child, and where he/she lived presently. We also administered the D-15 panel to
screen for color vision deficiency.
The color naming part of the experiment consisted of two phases: free-naming and constrained naming.
The free-naming phase of the experiment was always completed first, and informants were not apprised
of the second, constrained-naming, phase until after the first phase was completed. All but one informant
completed both color naming phases in one 1½-hour experimental session. The remaining informant
required two 1½-hour sessions to complete the two color naming phases of this study. Subjects were paid
with a $10 gift card for their participation
In the free-naming phase of the experiment, the experimenter presented each of the 330 Munsell samples
in the light box in a fixed, pseudo-random order. The subject named each color sample in turn. The
instructions were to name the colors of the samples, based on the following three criteria:
1. The color name must be a single word. (Compound words like light-blue, dark-green, and
words with intrinsic modifiers like yellowish, are not acceptable.)
8 2. The word must be a general color name, applicable to anything of that color. (Blond, for
example, is not such a word, as it is used to name the color of hair, furniture or beer, but not, for
example, a car or a potato.)
3. The word must be the one that you would normally use to name the color of something in your
everyday life. (We are not looking for a unique name for each color. We are not testing for how
many different color names you know or can dream up, or how many subtle distinctions in color
you can name. We want just to know how you naturally name the colors, when you can use only
a one-word name.)
Once we had instructed the informant and answered any questions, the informant was allowed to use
whatever color terms he/she chose: informants complied with criterion #1 without exception, and we did
not interrupt to object to terms that might have violated criteria #2 – #3. Color terms that were not among
the 11 BCTs of Berlin & Kay were flagged on the data sheet. The free-naming data set was the full set of
monolexemic color terms provided by this sample of informants.
The instructions in the free-naming phase of data collection differed somewhat from those used in the
WCS protocol. In that study, field workers were encouraged to elicit short, single-word BCTs from their
informants, in their native language. However, there was probably considerable variation in how these
instructions were actually followed by field workers (see Cook, Kay, and Regier, 2005). Thus, we believe
our color naming protocol adhered reasonably well to that of the WCS, as actually implemented in the
field. Moreover, by using a monolexemic color naming protocol in the first phase of data collection, we
could compare our results to those of prior studies of English monolexemic color naming by Boynton and
Olson (1987, 1990) and by Sturges and Whitfield (1995, 1997).
In the constrained-naming phase of the experiment, we gave the informant a printed list of the 11 BCTs.
We then presented, for a second time and in reverse order, the samples corresponding to the color terms
that were flagged in the free-naming phase of the experiment, and required the informant to provide a
BCT from the list. The colors provided in the constrained-naming phase were added to the data set
obtained in the free-naming phase to create a second complete constrained-naming data set. Results
Color terms elicited under free-naming instructions
Every informant in this sample succeeded in naming every sample with a monolexemic color term in the
free-naming phase of the study. The 51 native American-English-speaking informants used a total of 122
color terms to name the 330 Munsell samples (Tables I, II). Figure 2a and Table IIIa present the most
commonly used basic and non-basic color terms in this study. The mean number of free-naming color
terms per informant was 21.9 (SD= 7.6), and the minimum number of color terms was 12 (Fig. 3a).
9 Among the non-basic terms, peach was used by the largest number of informants (40 out of 51
informants). Teal, which was used by 32 of 51 informants, was the only other non-basic term used by
over half of informants. Fifty-nine of the 122 color terms (48.4%) were used by only one informant each,
and of those, 25 were used only a single male informant. The inventory of frequently used non-basic color
terms in Fig. 2a and Table IIIa is qualitatively similar to that reported by Boynton & Olson (1987, 1990)
and by Sturges and Whitfield (1995). However, none of those previous studies mentions teal in its nonbasic color inventory; instead they report the use of turquoise, which we found to be synonymous with
teal (we deal with color term synonymy below). None of Sturges and Whitfield's informants used
lavender, though they did report the term lilac, which we found to be synonymous with lavender. Finally,
Boynton & Olson (1990) reported that both peach and tan were used by all nine of their informants,
compared to 62.7% and 45.1%, respectively, of informants in this study. Boynton & Olson (1987, 1990)
speculated that peach might be an emerging twelfth English BCT. We will return to this point in the
Discussion section of this report.
While every informant used all the BCTs of Berlin & Kay, the BCTs differed considerably in their
frequency of usage (Table IIIa). On average, 24.0% of the sample presentations (4035 of 16830 total
responses) elicited green as a color term, followed by blue (16.9%). Red, with a usage rate of 3.3%, was
the least elicited of the chromatic BCTs. Of the neutrals, black was elicited by 1.9% of the 330 color
samples across the 51 informants, white was elicited by 4.7%, and gray was elicited by 2.2%. The nonbasic term used to name the most samples was teal (2.0% of samples), followed by peach (1.5%) and
lavender (1.3%). The only term for light blue was sky, which was used by only four subjects, to name
0.21% of samples.
10 11 Figure 2: Histograms of color term usage in the free-naming phase
of the experiment. a, the number of informants using each of the 43
color terms used by three or more informants; b, the free-naming
data consolidated by cluster analysis into glossed categories.
Figure 3: a, the distribution of the number of
informants using each total number of color terms
in the free-naming phase of the experiment. b, the
distribution of the free-naming data after
synonymous color terms were consolidated into
color category clusters. The red arrows indicate 11,
the number of BCTs according to Berlin & Kay.
Even after consolidation, no informant used only
11 color terms, and the modal number of glossed
color terms was 18.
12 Figure 4. The number of informants using each of 43 unglossed color terms used by four or more
informants (circles), and 20 glossed color terms (triangles), plotted against their sorted rank order. The
first eleven terms, used by all 51 informants, are the BCTs (horizontal red lines). Both graphs show
reliable changes in slope (arrows), with rare color terms being used by very few informants (gray
symbols). Circles are displaced downward for clarity. See text for further details and discussion.
Many investigators have found the frequency of word use conforms to a power law, that is, the logarithms
of the frequency with which words occur fall on a line when graphed as a function of the logarithm of
their rank order (see Mitzenmacher, 2003, for a review). Contrary to that general result, when we graphed
the number of informants using each term (here, the term’s “popularity”) as a function of the sorted rank
order of that term’s popularity (Fig. 4, lower data set), the data were broken quite sharply into three
regimes. First, there was a ceiling effect, as the BCTs were all used by all 51 informants, and are therefore
fitted perfectly by a constant function. For the next 17 most popular terms, the power law had an exponent
of -1.2, whereas the power law for the less-popular terms was -3.32 (gray circles in Fig. 4). The slopes of
these functions depended somewhat on how ties were treated in the rank ordering (here, tied frequencies
have consecutive ranks), and how the BCTs were shown on the graph (here, included as 11 tied
frequencies). However, no matter how we treated the ties, there was always a break in the function after
the 28th term (11 BCTs plus 17 additional popular terms; numbers listed in Table II; colors listed in Table
IIIa). Double-power law behavior is common in language corpora, where two exponents often “divide
words in two different sets: a kernel lexicon formed by about N versatile words and an unlimited lexicon
for specific communication” (Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2001).
Color terms elicited under constrained-naming instructions
Under the constrained color naming instructions, all the informants succeeded in naming all of the
samples for which they had provided non-basic color terms in the free-naming part of the protocol. This
was accomplished with small amounts of grumbling from some informants, who found some of the
peach-colored samples particularly challenging.
All informants used all of the BCTs to name at least some of the color samples, so the median/average
number of basic color terms was 11, and the interquartile range/SD was nil. On average, 27.9% of
samples (4693 of 16830 total responses by 51 subjects) elicited green as a color term, followed by blue
13 (19.3%), with red, once again, being the least used chromatic term (4.2%). Black was elicited on 1.9% of
total responses, white was elicited on 4.9%, and gray was elicited on 2.3% of trials.
Consensus in color term usage
In their 1969 monograph, Berlin & Kay wrote that the BCTs in any language, including English, are
"psychologically salient". By this, they meant that all competent speakers of the language use the BCTs
with high consensus and consistency. What were the salient colors in this data set? Figure 5 shows
consensus maps for the free-naming (left) and constrained-naming (right) phases of this study. Each of the
330 small rectangles within each map in Fig. 5 corresponds to a color sample (its true color is illustrated
in the corresponding location in Fig. 1a), and its false-color hue encodes its most frequent color term. In
the case of black, the false-color code was orange (the actual orange category is in a lighter shade of
orange in the figure) and for gray it was chartreuse. The BCTs constitute the most frequent names for
99% (326/330) of the color samples named by the informants in the free-naming phase of this study. Only
four color samples, which were in the “peach” area of the color chart, received non-basic color terms
most of the time. The maximum consensus for peach was 0.61 of informants (see Boynton & Olson,
1987, for a similar result). Of course, the BCTs were the modal color terms for all the samples in the
constrained color naming data set.
The false-color light-to-dark values of the samples shown in Figs. 5a and 5d encode the consensus; that is,
the fraction of informants who used the modal name, normalized to the overall maximum value for
visibility in the figure. The consensus in the constrained color naming data set (Fig. 5d) was higher within
color categories and lower near the color category boundaries, indicating variation across subjects in the
locations of the boundaries between the BCTs. The consensus was generally lower overall in the freenaming task (average consensus = 0.74; Fig. 5a) than in the constrained-naming task (average consensus
= 0.85), because informants used non-basic terms in addition to the BCTs in the free-naming task.
In Figs. 5b, c, e, and f, the data from Fig. 5a and 5d were examined by applying two threshold levels of
consensus: 1.00 (Figs. 5b, 5e) and 0.80 [Figs. 5c, 5f; 0.80 was one of the criterion levels used by Kay et
al. (2010) in their description of the World Color Survey data set]. In those diagrams, the chromatic color
categories named at or above the critical value of consensus appear as islands of at-or-above-threshold
agreement, separated by black boundary regions of below-threshold agreement. Agreement among
subjects was perfect (consensus = 1.0) for 6.3% of samples in the free-naming data set and for 31% of
samples in the constrained-naming data set. Fifty-two percent of the samples in the free-naming data set
and 69% of the samples in the constrained-naming data set reached or exceeded a consensus criterion of
0.80. None of the samples in the free-naming data set were called white, red, yellow, pink, or orange by
all informants, and even in the constrained-naming data set, no samples were called white or red by all
informants. However, at 0.80 consensus threshold, all the BCTs were represented in both the free-naming
and constrained-naming data sets. The dots in Fig. 5 are the “focal colors” of Berlin & Kay (1969) and
Sturges and Whitfield (1995), that is, the colors that were chosen by their informants to be the best
examples of each of the color categories. The focal colors correspond closely to the regions of high colornaming agreement, which indicates that color samples were named with high consensus if they were, on
average, particularly good examples of named color categories. Conversely, as colors deviated more and
more in appearance from the focal colors, subjects were more variable in their responses and consensus
agreement declined.
14 The features of the 0.80 threshold consensus map for the constrained-naming task generally agreed with
the results of prior studies of English color naming by other investigators (Boynton & Olson, 1987, 1990;
Sturges & Whitfield, 1995). Green and blue were the only named categories that extended vertically
throughout the lightness range. All the other basic color categories were confined to restricted ranges of
lightness: pinks and yellows were light compared to the neutral background against which the colors are
viewed, and reds and browns appeared among the lower-lightness warm colors; orange was at an
intermediate lightness value.
Figure 5. Diagrams of color naming consensus in the free-naming (a-c) and constrained-naming (d-f)
tasks. See text for details of color-coding. a, d, consensus maps of the usage of the BCTs of Berlin & Kay.
Second and third rows, samples for which the consensus reached or exceeded two threshold criteria: 1.0
(b, e.) and 0.8 (e, f). Red dots: focal colors from Berlin & Kay (1969); orange dots: focal colors from
Sturges & Whitfield (1995).
Color-term centroids
To examine the individual data, we calculated the color-term centroids, for each term for each informant,
from the free-naming phase of the study (Fig. 6). Each centroid (shown by the colored dots) was defined
as the average coordinates of the samples that were named with the corresponding term by one subject,
specified within the 2-D Cartesian coordinate frame of the color chart shown in Fig. 1. The faint colors in
the backgrounds of Figs. 6a - 6d are the false colors from Fig. 3f, corresponding to the modal BCTs used
at consensus ≥ 0.80. Here, we provide this map as a guide for examining the color term centroids. The
black dots in Fig. 6a are the averages of the centroids across all 51 subjects. For comparison, the white
dots are the average centroids obtained from 20 University of Teesside (U.K.) undergraduates by Sturges
& Whitfield (1995), whose 446 Munsell color samples spanned a greater range of chromas than were
used in the present study. The centroids from the two studies agree fairly well.
A striking feature of the individual data is the informant-to-informant variation in the usage of the nonbasic color terms. Informants often used different color names to label similar regions of color space. For
example, in the central region of the color chart (Fig. 6b), there were seven different non-basic color
terms: teal, turquoise, aquamarine, aqua, jade, ocean, and seafoam. These terms reliably denoted colors
that fall near the boundary between the blue and green BCT categories, and the distributions of the
centroids for these seven terms were broad and showed considerable overlap. However, the centroids
were not quite identical, suggesting that informants might differ slightly in the meanings they associate
15 with these nearly synonymous color terms. The centroids for maroon and burgundy showed almost
perfect overlap, and the centroids for lavender and lilac also overlapped greatly within the upper-lightness
range of samples called purple on the constrained-naming task. The centroids for violet, like those for
teal, covered a large range of lightnesses, suggesting that violet was generally not synonymous with
lavender and lilac.
Figure 6. Centroids of named color categories provided by
individual informants in the free-naming task. a, Centroids of
the 11 BCTs of Berlin & Kay, with the group average
centroids (black dots) and the centroids of Sturges and
Whitfield (white dots). Color key for the chromatic color
terms is above and below the diagram. b, Individual
differences in non-basic color term usage. The centroids for
tan are disjointly distributed in the warm color region of the
chart. Informants used several terms—some of which were
uncommon—in the area between the green and blue BCTs:
teal, turquoise, aquamarine, aqua, jade, ocean, and seafoam.
The dark purplish centroids within the green region (e.g.,
arrow) are for the color puce. c, Centroids of the 17 (Tables II,
IIIa). Most non-basic color terms in the free-naming task fall
near the boundaries between the BCTs, where consensus for
the BCTs is low. However, lime, olive, lavender and lilac
(arrows) are generally proper subsets of green and purple,
respectively. Color key for panels b and c is below panel c,
and the asterisks refer to the centroids indicated with arrows.
d, Informants used color terms for the light colors peach,
yellow, lime, lavender, and pink, but not for light blue. Color
key above the diagram.
In contrast, different individual informants used some color terms to name quite different colors. For
example, the centroids for tan (Fig. 6b) appeared in two disjoint areas of the color diagram: one area
overlapped with the centroids for peach and beige, and the other was close to the centroids for olive.
Similarly, informants used chartreuse to mean either greenish-yellow or desaturated green (synonymous
with lime). Puce is also interesting, as all three of the informants who used this term applied it to
yellowish-green colored samples. Apparently informants using puce did not know that it refers to a dark,
highly saturated purplish red or purplish-brown, and they assigned the color term instead to the color of
vomit (purple dots in Fig. 6b).
The Non-Basic Color Terms: partition or boundary colors?
These data sets allowed us to examine the second conjecture and the two hypotheses about the origins of
new color categories: the partition hypothesis of Kay and his colleagues, and the emergence hypothesis of
Levinson. We examined the locations of the centroids of the color naming patterns in the free-naming
data set, relative to the boundaries of the BCTs obtained from the constrained-naming data. If the partition
16 hypothesis is correct, then each non-basic color term will tend to be located within one of the BCT
categories, with its centroid at some distance from the nearest BCT boundary. In contrast, if the
emergence hypothesis is correct, and new terms intrude into the areas between named categories, then the
centroids for the non-basic color terms will be located near the nearest BCT boundary, and the average
distance to the nearest boundary will be near zero.
For each color-naming pattern for each informant, we calculated the unsigned distance between its
centroid and the nearest BCT boundary, expressed as the number of samples between the centroid and the
closest boundary (above, below, to the right or to the left of the centroid). Inasmuch as the centroids were
not integers, the separation between the centroids and the boundaries were not integers either. Figure 7
shows the results of this analysis in two ways. In the line graphs, the distance data from the informants
who used a given color term were binned into half-chip bins. Each line shows, for a given color term, the
number of informants who placed it within 0.5 chips of the nearest boundary, between 0.5 and 1 chip of
the nearest boundary, and so forth. Not surprisingly, the centroids of the BCTs were well-centered within
their respective categories (Fig. 7a, see also Fig. 6a), so the distances to their nearest boundaries were
generally greater than one chip. The closest bin (under 0.5 chip separation) was never the most frequent
separation between a BCT centroid and its nearest boundary. In contrast, the distance data for 13 of the 17
most frequently used non-basic chromatic colors was at its maximum within a chip of zero, as predicted
by the emergence hypothesis. Figure 7b shows the results for four representative non-basic chromatic
color terms. However, the distance data of 4 of the 17 most common non-basic terms peaked at a distance
of more than one chip. These were lavender and lilac, and olive and lime (Figure 7c; compare to Fig. 6c,
arrows).
Figure 7. The positions of the centroids of the color terms,
expressed as the unsigned distance (in number of chips) to the
nearest BCT boundaries. a. the BCT centroids. b, c. the centroids of
eight non-basic color terms. d, the average locations of the centroids
for the 25 chromatic color terms from the free-naming data set on
the upper limb in Fig. 4.
The bar graph (Fig. 7d) shows the average of the unsigned nearest-boundary distances for each color
term. The average distances for the BCTs and the non-basic chromatic color terms overlap only slightly: 7
of the 25 most frequently used chromatic color terms (the chromatic color terms shown with the white
17 disks in Fig. 4; see Table II) fall into the overlap region between 1 and 1.5 chips; the average distance for
the other colors were all cleanly divided between the BCTs, which were centered in their BCT categories,
and the non-basic color terms, which appeared at the boundaries of the color terms. The three non-basic
terms that fell in the overlap region were lavender, lilac, and lime. The average distance between the
BCTs and their nearest color boundary was 1.78 chips (SD = 0.89) and for the non-basic color terms was
0.65 chips (SD = 0.34), a statistically significant difference: t7 = 3.50, d.f. = 8, p = 0.008.
In summary, the non-basic color terms generally appeared at the boundaries between the BCT categories.
This result was broadly in agreement with Levinson’s emergence hypothesis. However, the color terms
for light purple (lavender and lilac) and light- and dark-yellowish-green (lime and olive) appear to be
partition colors, in the sense of Kay and his colleagues. These results showed that both processes could
occur, although the intrusion of new colors in between established categories may be more frequent in
modern American English. Previous work by Sturges & Whitfield (1997) suggested qualitatively that
British English might also have more intrusion colors than partition colors. American English Glosses
Inspection of the list of color terms from the free-naming phase of the experiment (Table IIIa), and the
examination of the individual data outlined above, suggested that many of the terms that subjects used
might be synonyms. Perhaps the very large number of color terms shown in Figs. 2a and 3a would be
much smaller if those synonym groups were to be consolidated into larger color categories, much as
Lindsey & Brown (2006) did in their cluster analysis of the WCS. Therefore, we applied a similar kmeans
analysis to the present data set. Briefly, we expressed each chromatic color term (i.e., each term not used
to name any of the 10 achromatic color samples in the WCS chart) deployed by each of the 51 informants
as a 320 element binary feature vector, representing the 320 chromatic color samples in the WCS chart.
For a given color term (say, yellow) used by a particular informant, each element of the term's feature
vector was assigned the value 1 if that informant called the corresponding chromatic sample “yellow” and
0 otherwise. Applying this encoding to all of the chromatic words used by our informants yielded a total
of 963 binary feature vectors. We then performed a kmeans cluster analysis, computing a partition of the
feature vectors into k = 2 clusters, then k = 3, then k = 4, and so forth. Kmeans works by assigning each
feature vector to the "nearest" cluster in feature space. We used a distance metric of (1 - r) to determine
nearness, where r is the Pearson correlation coefficient between a feature vector and a cluster centroid.
Kmeans is an iterative clustering algorithm, and the initial positions of the centroids in feature space must
be assigned. K feature vectors, chosen at random from the data set, served as the initial centroids at the
start of each run. The resulting kmeans partition can be somewhat sensitive to these initial conditions.
Therefore, each kmeans partition reported here is based on the best of 100 replications per value of k,
where “best” was defined as the clustering that produced the smallest within-cluster distances among
cluster members, summed across all k clusters. All computations were performed in Matlab (The
MathWorks, inc., Natick, MA), using its “kmeans( )” function.
An important goal of our cluster analysis was to determine an optimal value for k. At what value of k are
the feature vectors partitioned into their “natural” clusters, i.e., the clusters that correspond to distinctly
different color terms? In particular, we wondered whether there were more than the eight chromatic
BCTs specified by Berlin & Kay. This is a difficult question to answer with cluster analysis because there
is no ground-truth against which the solution corresponding to a particular value of k can be assessed (if
18 there were such a ground-truth, it would not be necessary to perform the cluster analysis, and the problem
would be merely to classify the terms into their known clusters).
To deal with this issue, we followed an approach based on the gap statistic described by Tibshirani,
Walther, & Hastie (2001). This approach is based on a comparison between the clustering of the data and
the corresponding clustering of a synthesized reference set of feature vectors. The reference set is created
by sampling from a uniform distribution of vectors in feature space that have all the statistical properties
of the data, except that by design they have no natural clustering. For each kmeans clustering of j data
points into k clusters, let Di(k) be the sum of the distances between points within the ith cluster (i=1,...,k)
and the corresponding cluster centroid. Then TDD(k) is the total of within-cluster distances across all k
clusters. Now, let TDR(k) represent this result for the clustering of a reference set of j feature vectors into
k clusters. The gap g(k) is the difference between log TDD(k) and the mean of log TDRn(k), obtained
from clusterings of n reference sets drawn from the uniform reference distribution:
Equ. 1
The gap statistic is based on the intuition that if a data set contains exactly kopt clusters, then g(k) will
increase for k ≤ kopt, since kmeans is doing an increasingly better job of reducing within-cluster distances
in the data set as k approaches kopt, when compared to the distances obtained by clusterings of the
reference sets, which by design have no clusters. For k > kopt , the partitions must split one or more of the
kopt clusters, and g(k) will not continue to improve and may even decline, relative to g(kopt).
Let G(k) represent the change in gap between the kth and the kth +1 clustering.
G(k)= g(k+1) - g(k) - sTDR(k+1) .
Equ. 2
where sTDR(k+1) is an error term related to the standard deviation of the log TDRn(k). Then, kopt is defined
as the largest k before the first zero crossing of G(k) (see Tibshirani et al., 2001 for details). Formally,
this rule is stated as follows:
.
Equ. 3
Among the virtues of the gap statistic is that it can test for the absence of any clusters in the data set (i.e.,
kopt = 1).
Our gap statistic analysis was based on n=20 reference sets. To create a reference set, we took the 963
color naming patterns from our data set. The centroid of each pattern was then randomly relocated to a
new location in the coordinate frame of our WCS color sample space, and a feature vector for this new
pattern was created, based on the new location. Thus, our reference sets preserved exactly the
distributions of the sizes and shapes of regions of color space associated with the color terms observed in
the original data set. However, in each reference set, the locations of the centroids of the feature vectors
were drawn from a uniform distribution of centroids falling within the coordinate frame of the WCS color
chart, and therefore had no natural clusters.
Preliminary studies indicated that despite adopting a best-of-100-replications criterion for the clustering
of our data, several independent clusterings of the data for a given value of k still tended to produce small
19 differences in TDD(k). In order to assess the impact of this variation on our gap statistic analysis, we ran
1000 separate analyses. For each analysis, we created kmeans clusterings of the data for k=1,...,25 and
compared those to the corresponding clusterings on a new ensemble of 20 reference sets.
Figure 8 shows the values of the gap statistic G(K) over the 1000 runs, and the inset shows the
distribution of kopt. The minimum value of kopt was 11, so there were always at least three more clusters in
the data set than the 8 chromatic BCTs listed by Berlin & Kay. The mode of the kopt distribution (which
was close to its median and its mean) at kopt = 17 was the best estimate of the statistically significant
chromatic clusters in the free-naming data set.
Thus, the first cluster analysis of the free-naming data yielded a glossary of 20 color categories (17
chromatic color categories, plus black, white and gray; Table II). This glossary included 9 more chromatic
clusters in the free-naming data set than there are BCTs according to the first conjecture of Berlin & Kay.
All informants used more than 11 glossed color categories; the most frequent number was 18 (Fig. 3b).
Figure 8. The gap statistic (see Equ. 3 in the main text) as a function of number of
chromatic clusters k. Each individual line in the main graph represents the results for one
of 1000 comparisons between the kmeans clusterings of the data for k=1,…,25 and
corresponding clusterings of ensembles of 20 reference null sets. See text for details.
Inset: histogram of kopt derived from the 1000 functions shown in the main graph. This
analysis indicates that there are about 17 chromatic color terms in American English (red
arrow in main figure).
Consensus diagrams of the 17 chromatic color terms appear in Fig. 9. In this report, we call them by the
names most commonly used by informants (above each diagram in Fig. 9; see also Fig. 2b). The second
result was that even when all the colors were consolidated into their kopt clusters, none of the nine
20 statistically significant non-basic chromatic categories was used by 100% of informants (Table IIIb,
categories of rank 12 - 20). The clusters illustrated in Fig. 9 were used in the motifs analysis described
later in this report.
The glossary derived from the k=17 solution varied slightly from run-to-run. Repeated runs of kmeans
revealed essentially the same glossary, but occasionally the "lime" cluster shown in Fig. 9 was replaced
by a "rust" (dark red) category. Most kmeans runs produced cluster centroids that were all confined to
contiguous regions of feature space, like those illustrated in Fig. 9. Occasionally, however, one of the 17
consensus maps derived from cluster analysis covered two disjoint regions of the color chart. One of the
regions was always more prominently represented than the other, and the corresponding cluster centroids
were easily associated with one of the observed non-basic color terms. In any event, the minor run-torun perturbations in the kmeans derivation of the American English glossary did not affect the main
conclusions drawn from the motifs analysis discussed below. Figure 9. Consensus diagrams of the 17 chromatic color terms identified by the first kmeans
cluster analysis.
American English Motifs
In their analysis of the WCS data set, Lindsey & Brown (2009) found that the color naming systems of
individual informants around the world fell into about four motifs, and that multiple motifs were present
in the data sets of the great majority of the WCS languages. To determine whether these results also apply
to American English, we performed a second kmeans analysis on the present data set, based on the
glossary of 20 terms revealed by the first kmeans analysis.
For each of the 51 informants, we created a feature vector consisting of 20 elements, one element for each
of the glossed terms (the 17 chromatic color terms in Fig. 9, plus Black, White and Gray; see Tables II
and IIIb). Each of the 20 elements had a value corresponding to the fraction of samples (out of 330) in the
WCS chart assigned to that particular gloss by the first cluster analysis. For example, if a given informant
21 named 20 samples using one or more words synonymous with teal, then the teal element of that
informant's feature vector was assigned the value of 0.061 (20/330).
We performed a series of kmeans analyses on the set of 51 informants’ feature vectors, to create partitions
of k=1, ..., 5 clusters. There was almost no between-run variation in the kmeans solutions. To determine
how many clusters were statistically significant, we created reference feature vectors, in ensembles of 20
sets, by creating scrambled versions of the informants' feature vectors. We then used the results of the
kmeans analysis of the informants’ feature vectors and the sets of reference feature vectors to perform a
gap statistical analysis as outlined above (Tibshirani et al., 2001).
This analysis revealed two statistically significant motifs in American English. Figure 10 shows the
consensus maps for the two motifs, as well as the 0.80 threshold consensus maps. The informants whose
data fell into the first motif used primarily the eight chromatic BCTs of Berlin & Kay (plus black, white
and gray). Thus, the first motif is similar to the “green-blue” (GB) motif in the WCS, which was sonamed after the color terms corresponding to the cool colors (Lindsey & Brown, 2009). Informants
expressing this motif tended to use the non-basic color terms in the glossary idiosyncratically and with
low frequencies. The informants whose data fell into the second motif also used the 11 BCTs of Berlin &
Kay, but they also used some additional terms extensively and consistently, particularly teal, peach,
lavender and maroon. Figure 10d shows that consensus for each of these terms equaled or exceeded 0.8
for some of the color samples. We will call this the “green-teal-blue” (GTB) motif because of the names
given to the cool colors. The GTB motif is new, and did not appear in the WCS analysis. Fourteen
informants used the GTB motif, whereas 37 informants used the GB motif. Partition of informants’ data
into the GB and GTB motifs increased color-naming consensus from the overall value 0.74 for the freenaming data set as a whole to an average within-motif consensus of 0.80 (GB consensus = 0.82; GTB
consensus = 0.77). We created 100,000 partitions of the informants’ data into two random “motifs” with
37 individuals in one “motif” and 14 individuals in the other. None of these partitions achieved an
average within-motif consensus as high as the one we obtained by cluster analysis of our free-naming
data. Therefore, the statistical significance of our k-means-based partition is p<10-5.
Figure 10. The results of the second cluster analysis, based on the glossed color naming
patterns from the free-naming task. a, b, About 73% (37/51) of informants fell into a cluster
that corresponded closely to the green-blue motif of Lindsey & Brown (2009). This motif is
similar to the Stage-VII pattern of Berlin & Kay, being comprised primarily of the 11 BCTs. a,
Consensus map; b, 0.8 threshold consensus map. c, d, The remaining 27% (14/51) of
informants fell into a second green-teal-blue motif, which is new here. The new motif included
high-consensus non-basic terms for maroon, peach, teal, and lavender. These new colors (see
arrows) appear in both the consensus map (c) and the 0.8 threshold consensus map (d).
22 The results shown in Fig. 10 were remarkably robust, as they were essentially independent of the precise
representation of informant feature vectors that was chosen, the dissimilarity metric, or even the size of
the glossary (12<=k<=22) extracted from the first cluster analysis. For example, in addition to the 20element informant feature vectors described above, we performed a separate analysis employing 330
element vectors, where each element was assigned a nominal value representing one of the 20 glossed
terms. In this approach, which Lindsey & Brown (2009) used in their analysis of the WCS motifs, the
dissimilarity metric was a modified Jaccard coefficient (Leisch, 2006). In yet another version of the motif
analysis, the 20-element feature vectors were populated with z-scores representing deviations of each
informant's usage of each glossed term from the mean. The most striking result was that all these
approaches agreed very well on the identity of the first two motifs: a green-blue motif and a second motif
– green-teal-blue – with high informant usage of teal, peach, maroon and lavender. Beyond two motifs,
the various cluster analyses mostly generated minor variations on the green-blue motif and variations of
the green-teal-blue motif that emphasized various subsets of the four additional categories in the greenteal-blue motif. The main differences between the various approaches were in their statistical power. The
330-dimension approach revealed only one statistically significant motif, whereas the 20-dimension
approach involving z-scores revealed four statistically significant motifs. The 330-dimension approach
from 2009 worked on the WCS data set because of the enormous number of observations, where
statistical power was not an issue. However, that approach was apparently underpowered for the present
application.
Figure 10c, d also reveal that three of the four high-consensus non-basic color terms appear in the lowconsensus regions of the chart between the BCTs: peach appears in the dark, low-consensus area between
pink, orange, yellow and white, teal appears between green and blue, and maroon appears between red
and black. These color terms evidently name new categories that arose between categories that previously
existed, along the lines proposed by Levinson, and were not the result of partitioning existing color
categories into smaller sets. In contrast, the samples called lavender in the free-naming task were a proper
subset of the purple category, consistent with the partition hypothesis of Kay and his colleagues.
The popularity of glossed color terms.
The number of informants using each of the terms corresponding to the 20 glossed color categories from
the first kmeans cluster analysis (Table IIIb) appears as a function of their rank order of their popularity as
the upper graph (triangles) in Fig. 4. As before, the BCTs were at the ceiling, and were fitted with a
constant line. There was a clear break in the function fitted to the non-basic terms no matter how we dealt
with ties in rank ordering the data. The four most popular non-basic terms were fitted with a power law of
exponent -0.79 (white triangles), whereas the remaining 5 terms were best fit with exponent –2.3 (gray
triangles). The four non-basic categories on the second limb of the function were teal, peach, lavender and
maroon, the same terms that appeared in the GTB motif. This clear distinction between the popularity of
the four new terms in the GBT motif and the remaining five statistically-significant terms provides
additional evidence, independent of the second kmeans motifs analysis, that the those four additional
glossed terms are well-integrated into the color lexicons of many informants, along with the original 11
BCTs of Berlin & Kay.
23 Gender and color naming.
We also examined the free-naming data set to determine whether the American women and men in this
sample differed in the number of terms in their color vocabularies. On average, men used 9.71 non-basic
color terms, whereas women used 12.3 non-basic color terms, a statistically significant difference (t =
2.025, p = 0.043, after log-transforming the frequencies to normalize their distribution). Figure 11a shows
the number of males and females using each of the non-basic terms used by 3 or more informants.
Women generally used those terms in Fig. 11a more frequently than did men (average difference = 0.070,
t39=2.50, p=0.017, two-tailed). When the non-basic color terms were consolidated into categories, this
gender difference persisted (Fig. 11b; average difference = 0.117, t8=2.72, p=0.027, two-tailed).
Furthermore, men and women were unevenly distributed across the two motifs (Fig. 11c), with women
significantly less likely to use the GB motif, and more likely to use the second, GTB motif, than men:
t49=2.30, p=0.026. Apparently women’s color vocabularies contained more terms than those of men, and
women also distinguished more color categories than men did.
There is a sizeable literature on the subject of gender and color naming (e.g., DuBois, 1939; Nowaczyk,
1982; Simpson & Tarrant, 1991); (but see also Machen, 2002; Sturges & Whitfield, 1995). However, data
like these do not indicate whether this difference between men and women is biological or social in
origin. On the biological side, K. A. Jameson, Highnote, & Wasserman (2001) have argued that women
identify more color categories than men do because of the well-understood sex-linked genetic differences
in their visual pigments (Nathans, Merbs, Sung, Weitz, & Wang, 1992). Also on the biological side, there
are other biological differences between males and females that can explain subtle, quantitative
differences between men and women in the appearance of colors (Abramov, Gordon, Feldman, &
Chavarga, 2012). We suspect that neither of these biological differences between males and females is
responsible for the difference between our male and female subjects. The genetic explanation seems
unlikely to be correct because recent evidence indicates that very few heterozygous women are actually
tetrachromats (Jordan, Deeb, Bosten, & Mollon, 2010), and the present difference between males and
females is probably much larger than the subtle differences of color appearance that were reported by
Abramov et al. (2012). An alternative view is that women’s role in society as consumers of the decorative
arts has honed their color discrimination into a finer sense of color appearance, resulting in superior color
category naming ability among women than among men (e.g., Rich, 1977; Swaringen, Layman, &
Wilson, 1978). The difficulty with the social hypothesis is that it does not make specific quantitative
predictions that could be falsified. Furthermore, other investigators have reported other domain-specific
differences in vocabulary size between the genders (Laws, 2004), which suggests that the difference in
the size of the color lexicons of men and women might be a specific instance of a more general, and lesscolor-related, phenomenon.
24 Figure 11. a, The fraction of males and females who used each non-basic color term shown in Fig 2a.
Vertical dashed line: the break point between the two power-law functions that were fitted to the disks
in Fig. 4 (Table II). b, The pattern of women using more color terms persisted when the non-basic
color terms were consolidated into their corresponding glossed color categories. Vertical dashed line
divides the four non-basic color terms (to the left of the line) in the second motif, from the other nonbasic color terms; it is also the break point between the two power law functions fitted to data in Fig.
4 (triangles). c, the fraction of males and females whose data fell into each of the two motifs. GB: the
green-blue motif; GTB: the green-teal-blue motif. Error bars: ± one standard error of the dividing line
between the two motifs.
Discussion
The data for this project were the color names provided for 330 Munsell color samples by 51 native
speakers of American English under two instructions: free-naming, where any monolexemic color term
could be used, and constrained-naming, where only the 11 Basic Color Terms (BCTs) of Berlin and Kay
(1969) were allowed. This sample of informants used a total of 122 color terms under free-naming
instructions, with an average consensus of 0.74, and 11 color terms under constrained-naming
instructions, with an average consensus of 0.85. When the free-naming data set was subjected to a cluster
analysis similar to that of Lindsey & Brown (2006), 20 statistically-significant color categories were
discovered, which included the BCTs of Berlin & Kay, plus nine non-basic chromatic categories.
Examination of the centroids of these nine non-basic categories revealed that their corresponding color
terms were generally deployed to name colors that fell in the low-consensus regions between the
chromatic BCTs of the constrained-naming data set, suggesting an “emergence”-like mechanism.
However, two terms, lime and lavender, were proper subsets that partitioned their corresponding BCTs,
green and purple, suggesting a “partition”-like mechanism.
A second cluster analysis, based on the glossary derived in the first analysis, revealed that this sample of
American English-speaking informants expressed two motifs. The first motif, expressed by 73% of
informants, was similar to the “green-blue” (GB) motif observed in the World Color Survey (Lindsey &
25 Brown, 2009). It was also similar to the color lexicon of BCTs listed by Berlin & Kay. The second greenteal-blue (GTB) motif was expressed by 27% of informants, and included four non-basic terms that were
used with high consensus: peach, teal, lavender, and maroon. Women were statistically more likely than
men to use the GTB motif. Dividing informants according to motif increased free-naming consensus from
its overall value of 0.74 to an average within-motif consensus of 0.80.
This prospectively designed study shows that the key features of color naming in the WCS are general to
a written language spoken in the United States. These key features are the diversity among the speakers of
a single language in how colors are to be named, and the way in which the language’s color terms are
deployed across the range of colors that any individual might encounter. Based on the published
literature, one might suspect that diversity across individuals in their color vocabularies might be
restricted to unwritten languages such as those in the WCS, which are spoken in non-industrialized
societies far from Western influence. Contrary to that supposition, prominent diversity in color
vocabulary among individuals who speak American English persisted, even after cluster analysis
consolidated the 122 color terms elicited in a free-naming protocol into a glossary of 20 distinct named
color categories. This indicates that diversity among informants is common even in American English.
One might also suspect that this apparent within-language diversity might be an artifact of each
informant’s haphazard color term choices (from a much larger color idiolect) chosen on the spur of the
moment, and might not reflect true individual differences in color cognition. On the contrary, the diversity
reported here was not haphazard: instead, there were two distinct motifs, which repeated themselves with
minor variation across the idiolects of these 51 informants. Thus, the phenomenon of multiple withinlanguage motifs observed in the unwritten languages of the WCS also generalizes to at least one written
language spoken in an industrialized society, namely American English. It is important to recognize that
our data analysis would not have revealed this important characteristic of the American English color
lexicon, had we not employed a methodology for handling color term synonymy.
The first conjecture of Berlin & Kay: the basic color terms and their universality.
Berlin & Kay’s (1969) first conjecture was that every language includes a vocabulary of no more than 11
BCTs, which are distinct from other ordinary color terms that an informant might use. In English, Berlin
& Kay’s BCTs are: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray.
According to Berlin & Kay, the BCTs in any language are monolexemic, abstract terms that are used by
all or nearly all competent speakers of that language, with high consensus and consistency, to name the
color of any type of object, including color samples such as those used in the present study. The 11 BCTs
of Berlin & Kay were indeed used by all 51 informants here, and they were the only terms that showed
such full usage. This general result is certainly consistent with Berlin & Kay’s first conjecture.
However, the free-naming data set shows several other features that are less obviously consistent with the
Berlin & Kay’s first conjecture. First, only seven of the BCTs were applied to any samples with 100%
consensus, omitting white, red, yellow, pink, and orange (Fig. 5b), so the requirement that the 11 BCTs
be high consensus is not perfectly observed. Second, every informant used at least 12 terms, and the
modal number of terms was 18, so the minimum number of terms is greater than 11. A third finding that
challenges Berlin & Kay's first conjecture is the frequency-vs.-rank power law functions derived from the
popularity data. If the 11 BCTs of Berlin & Kay were the only commonly-used terms, and if the nonbasic terms were entirely idiosyncratic in their use, the power law functions should fall off very steeply
26 for ranks greater than 11. Instead, both unglossed data and glossed data (white disks and triangles,
respectively, in Fig. 4) fell off with steepness near -1.0 for the first 17 unglossed and the first four glossed
non-basic terms. The expected precipitous decline followed (gray disks and triangles in Fig. 4). These
results suggest that there are about 28 common terms that are used and understood as part of the core
color vocabulary of American English; after glossing, 20 of these terms are statistically significant, and
about four of them seemed on their way to frequent use. Those four glossed terms are the key components
of the GTB motif, which is expressed by 14 of the 51 informants.
The flow of information from informant to listener is important to understanding the use of color terms in
communicating about color. Zipf’s law expresses the reciprocal relationship between the frequency of
independent observations (e.g., the usage of words in a language, the population of cities; in this case, the
popularity of color terms) and the rank order of those frequencies. In the case of language, Zipf’s law is
understood to reveal an evolutionary tradeoff between the need of the speaker to spend the least effort
necessary in communication, at the risk of reduced clarity (producing a small vocabulary), and the need of
the hearer for conciseness and clarity in the received message (requiring a larger vocabulary; (see Ferrer i
Cancho & Solé, 2003, for further discussion). Double-power law behavior is common, and is thought to
reflect two processes: one process that governs the creation of a kernel lexicon of limited size consisting
of versatile words designed for general but imprecise communication, and the other generating an
unlimited lexicon for specific communication (Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2001). The unglossed data set
shows a break in the function between the regimen for the more popular color terms (ranked 12…28) and
the less-popular color terms (ranked after 28). This discontinuity may be an instance of this distinction
between common color terms and those chosen on the spur of the moment from a larger color lexicon that
each informant has in his/her mind, but does not use routinely in everyday communication. Even the
glossed data has a steep-slope section, which occurs after four glossed categories. Taken together, the
results of our study show clearly that the BCTs are not sufficient to describe the core color vocabulary of
American English and additional non-basic terms play an essential role in communication about color.
The second conjecture: color term evolution
Berlin & Kay’s second conjecture was that color lexicons evolve over time by adding new color terms.
This evolution occurs as societies become technologically more complex, and as distinctions among
similar colors become more crucial in the everyday lives of their individual members (1969). We
examined this data set to determine whether it provided evidence in favor of the "successive
differentiation of existing categories" specifically suggested by Berlin & Kay’s partition hypothesis,
against the alternative view, which is Levinson’s emergence hypothesis (2000), whereby new color terms
are added to cover hard-to-name colors that for one reason or another have become particularly salient.
The results of these analyses provide some evidence for both Levinson’s and Kay’s views of color term
evolution. Much as Levinson suggested, 13 of the 17 frequently used non-basic color terms (from Fig. 4,
listed in Table II) appeared in the low-consensus regions between the BCTs, and their centroids were very
near the nearest BCT boundaries (Figs. 6, 7). For example, peach appears in the hard-to-name region
between orange, pink, white, and yellow. In contrast, four of the 17 non-basic color terms were clearly
“partition” colors, as predicted by Kay and his colleagues. For example, lavender appeared as a proper
subset of purple, suggesting that it partitions the large, previously undifferentiated purple category into
27 two smaller, more articulately named units. These results generally suggested that both “emergence” and
“successive differentiation” probably occur as American English adds new color terms.
Considering Berlin & Kay’s evolution conjecture, it is instructive to examine the terms for the light
colors. BCTs and non-basic color terms exist in American English to name the light colors in much of the
diagram: pink, peach, yellow, lime, and lavender (Figs. 6d, 12). In contrast, there is no commonly used,
high-consensus word that means “light blue” (Table IIIa), a finding consistent with Sturges and
Whitfield's (1995) report of non-basic term usage by informants of British English, and Boynton &
Olson's (1987,1990) studies of American English. Sky, the closest term to light blue, is included in the
unglossed data set in Figs. 2b and 12, but it ranks 43rd in popularity in this data set (Table IIIa), and does
not reach significance in the cluster analysis that created the glosses. In contrast to English, light blue has
been reported to be a standard (perhaps basic) color term in some Indo-European languages [Russian
(goluboj) (Winawer et al., 2007), Modern Greek (ghalazio) (Thierry et al., 2009), some forms of Spanish
(celeste), and Farsi (asamuni) (Friedl, 1979)], as well as some non-Indo-European languages [some forms
of Arabic (celesti) (Al-Rasheed et al., 2011; Borg, 2007); Turkish may distinguish dark blue from light
blue (lacivert vs. mavi) (Ozgen & Davies, 1998)]. Of the common light color terms in English, pink and
yellow are BCTs, peach is an “emergent” color, and lime and lavender are “partition” terms. Thus, a light
blue color term could appear either as a partition of blue, or as a boundary term between blue and white.
The fact that no common color term, basic or non-basic, exists for light blue suggests that the
“emergence” and “partition” mechanisms do not necessarily predict, universally, which color terms will
occur. This case study illustrates how little is really understood about how color terms are added to the
lexicons of world languages.
Figure 12. The number of informants using terms for light red (pink), light
orange (peach), yellow, light green (lime), light blue (sky) and light purple
(lavender), from Fig. 2. All but light blue are statistically significant color
categories in the cluster analysis, and appear in the set of glossed color
categories.
There has been considerable speculation over the years about what universal processes guide color term
evolution. Kay and his colleagues have emphasized the importance of universal aspects of the perceptual
representation of color appearance; particularly, Kay et al. 2010, emphasized the salience of the Hering
fundamental hue sensations red, green, blue, and yellow, plus black and white. While this account is at
least qualitatively in line with modern accounts of human color vision, it does not provide any insight into
the order in which color terms should appear as color lexicons change (however, see Ratliff, 1976).
Recent theories that are based on human perception of color differences predict that color terms should be
added in a manner that optimally partitions color space by minimizing color differences within the new
contiguous color categories, while maximizing color differences between adjacent categories (K. Jameson
& D'Andrade, 1987; Regier, Kay, & Khetarpal, 2007). Regier's simulations based on this principle
28 resemble Berlin & Kay’s evolution trajectory of color names up to six terms, but the authors do not show
simulations for lexicons greater than this number. Therefore, it is not clear that their simulations will
generalize to more than six terms. Interestingly, the explanation that Boynton & Olson (1987, 1990) give
to explain the possible emergence of peach as a new BCT is similar to the optimal partition principle of
Regier et al.
Other accounts of color term evolution have focused on the importance of the statistics of color in the
natural environment. Philipona and O'Regan (2006) argued that the red, green, blue and yellow universal
color categories extracted from the World Color Survey are special because the early visual responses to
the light from the corresponding surfaces are least perturbed by changes in the environmental illuminant.
On the basis of this account, one might expect all the Hering primary color categories to appear
consistently early in color term evolution. Contrary to that expectation, the WCS data set shows many
informants who use brown, gray, pink, or especially purple categories, while lacking a blue category
(Lindsey & Brown, 2009). Yendrikhovskij (2001) has shown that kmeans clustering (k = 2, 3, ... , 11) of
color samples obtained from pictures of natural scenes and represented in the CIELUV uniform
chromaticity space recapitulates the Berlin & Kay's evolutionary sequence of color term acquisition.
However, Steels and Belpaeme (2005) have shown that Yendrikhovskij's analysis is very sensitive to the
perceptual space in which color is represented. Therefore, they suggest that Yendrikhovskij's results are
due more to his choice of color model than to the statistics of the natural scene samples themselves.
Thus there are many deterministic accounts of how human color perception, possibly coupled with color
statistics in the natural environment, could guide color term evolution. The factors that underlie these
accounts undoubtedly place important constraints on color term evolution: clearly, not every conceivable
color term could come into being, and not every possible motif could evolve at every possible juncture in
color term change. These deterministic accounts resemble theories of biological development in some
ways, where change occurs from one state to the next, along a single pathway, subject to limited
variability across individuals. Contrary to that view, we believe that the trajectory of color lexicon change
is rather more stochastic than what is suggested by the deterministic accounts reviewed above. Color
lexicon change in general, and the addition of color terms beyond Berlin & Kay's 11 BCTs in particular,
are better understood in light of the principles that govern cultural evolution (Henrich, Boyd, &
Richerson, 2008). In this view, cultural change is analogous to Darwinian evolution, where change from a
given state can occur along any one of many trajectories, subject to processes analogous to mutation,
replication and selection (see, for example, Xu, Griffiths, & Dowman, 2013 for a study involving color
naming). Over time, these principles lead to changes in the relative prevalences of the different “species”
(motifs) of color naming within a language community. Consistent with this view, the languages in the
WCS differ from one another in the relative frequency of the expressed motifs (Lindsey & Brown, 2009),
just as isolated biological populations differ from one another in the fraction of individuals with certain
genetic alleles. Several recent studies—Steels and Belpaeme (2005), Komorova, Jameson & Narens
(2007), and Xu et al. (2013), among others—have attempted to model color term evolution along these
lines, and Kay and his colleagues are increasingly proposing a less linear and deterministic (and less
development-like), and a more reticulate and stochastic (and more evolution-like), account of color term
evolution based on the WCS data set. Consistent with this view of color term change as evolution, the
results of the present study have provided clear evidence for both color naming diversity among speakers
of American English, and the organization of this diversity into two distinct color-naming motifs.
29 Acknowledgements
Mr. Kevin Guckes assisted with data collection. This project was supported by a Fred Brown Award from
the Ohio State University Department of Psychology, the Ohio Lions Eye Research Foundation, and NSF
BCS-1152841.
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33